Edinburgh Research Explorer Apprenticeship in the Renaissance university Citation for published version: Oosterhoff, R 2019, 'Apprenticeship in the Renaissance university: Student authorship and craft knowledge', Science in Context, vol. 32, no. 2, pp. 119-136. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0269889719000140 Digital Object Identifier (DOI): 10.1017/S0269889719000140 Link: Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research Explorer Document Version: Peer reviewed version Published In: Science in Context General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 26. Sep. 2021 Apprenticeship in the Renaissance University: Student Authorship and Craft Knowledge1 Richard J. Oosterhoff, University of Edinburgh, [email protected] Argument: Students entered Renaissance universities as apprentices in the craft of books. In the decades around 1500, such university training began to involve not only manuscript circulation, but also the production and the use of books in the new medium of print. Through their role in the crafting of books, I show how a circle of students around Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples gained the experience needed to become bookmen. Students took classroom manuscripts and brought them into print—the new print shop offered students a place in which to exchange labour for credibility as joint authors. 1. INTRODUCTION As a learner, the premodern university student shared much with his artisan counterpart. Both youths joined corporations that originated in urban growth from the eleventh century onward, corporations in which “masters” certified and monopolised the flow of products and skills between cities.2 In fact, medieval jurists used the word universitas to name every sort of corporations, including early trade guilds as well the students or masters who comprised the early universities.3 On joining a university or guild, a youth left home and entered a new—largely homosocial—family, in which the master passed on skills and knowledge and also took on moral oversight of the youth in loco parentis, very often housing and feeding his charges. On joining the corporation and attaining status within it, both students and apprentices navigated a documentary culture of certification. A youth might find preliminary training in the craft, whether brickmaking or copying books, enough to secure an opportunity and so leave his training early. Many youths never sought certification (Wallis 2008, Kintzinger 2000, Schwinges 1992). A significant number, however, did. An ambitious youth might pursue his master’s vocation for himself, completing his years of apprenticeship or studies to gain the certification of journeyman or bachelor, and eventually attain the title of master, which in turn allowed him to train others. Such a youth engaged an economy of fees, gifts, ceremonial processions, and feasts designed to structure and regulate the hierarchies of the corporation, hierarchies that proliferated throughout the early modern period. The Enlightenment cameralist Johann Justi highlighted the shared frustrations of 1 Thanks are due to Feike Dietz, Els Stronk, and Sven Dupré for their thoughtful leadership in the workshops and editorial process leading to this special issue, as well as to the participants of those workshops for their fruitful conversation. I am also grateful to the anonymous peer reviewers for their careful reading and several suggestions. The research leading to this paper has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC grant agreement no 617391. This paper develops arguments opened up in Oosterhoff 2018. 2 Recent bibliography on the emergence of guild regulation and hierarchies is available in Lucassen et al. 2008, Anheim 2013. On the emergence of universities as corporations, see Post 1934, and more generally Ferruolo 1985, Verger 1991; and for mobility of qualifications, see Courtenay 1988. 3 Michaud-Quantin 1970, cit. Verger 1991, 37. 1 premodern guild and university: “Mastership too often comes from connections, and is given on the basis of ‘sumptuous masterpieces, never useful for normal life, and not at all given in view of diligence and true talent’” (von Justi 1755, quoted by Clark 2006, 12). The analogy of guild and university went even deeper. The material and conceptual realities of university life were often framed as the tools and products of craft or ars, a terminology that early modern universities inherited from their medieval forebears. The world was a giant workshop, suggested the medieval master Gerhoch of Reicherberg, and William of Conches added that “all work is the work of the creator, the work of nature, or of man-the-artisan imitating nature” (cit. Le Goff 1993, 57). Developing this account of mankind as irreducibly artisans, Hugh of St Victor emphasised that the artes are not sciences but techniques, since that is “called art which takes shape in some material medium and is brought out in it through manipulation of that material, as is the case in architecture”; Hugh therefore became the first to cast the mechanical arts as companions of the liberal arts (Hugh of St. Victor 1961, 62).4 Mary Carruthers has shown how deeply craft metaphors of habit and gesture permeated medieval understanding of intellectual work (Carruthers 1998). Jacques Le Goff and William Clark have suggested that premodern academic authority was vested in material objects and processes of making: books were not simply abstract vectors of ideas, but explicitly described as the tools and the products of intellectual commerce (Le Goff 1993; Clark 2006). Early modern university students and masters, I will show below, explicitly adapted such Victorine categories to explain their own intellectual work. Participation in book culture—whether production or use—has often justified the distinction of elites from the rest in the imaginations of social and cultural historians. Over the last thirty years, that distinction has worn thin. In the history of science and technology figures such as Robert Boyle turn out to have relied on entire households of “invisible technicians” who contributed both labour and knowledge to his science (Shapin 1989). We have learned from Carolyn Merchant’s insight that women and artisans contributed meaningfully to the new knowledge economy of the seventeenth century. 5 Recently book historians have taken the problem on more directly, focusing on the practices of collaborative authorship. Even the best-selling author of early modern Europe, Desiderius Erasmus himself, depended on a community to produce physical objects that could project his persona. 6 This case holds more generally. The often hidden collectors, collators, ammanuenses and other assistants played a more creative role in early modern authorship than we used to think (Grafton 2011, Blair 2017a). Grand personalities such as Erasmus and the quixotic encyclopedias of Conrad Gesner turn out not to be the artworks of singular geniuses, but rather the ingenious artefacts of entire communities. Even the apparently standardised and replicable knowledge that Elizabeth Eisenstein saw in printed books, 4 In this account, Hugh drew on Chalcidius’ commentary on the Timaeus, where God is artificer (e.g. Hugh of St. Victor 1961, 55). On Hugh’s place in various categorizations of the arts, see Whitney 1990, 82-99. 5 The literature is now vast (e.g. Leong and Rankin 2011, Dupré 2014) but early examples are Merchant 1980, Smith 2000. 6 See the marvelous study of Vanautgaerden 2012. Erasmus’ tense relationships with his printers have long been known: Allen 1913. Vanautgaerden, however, confirms that Erasmus adopted an authorial personality that both invoked and effaced his many amanuenses, correctors, and printers: see also Jardine 1993, 99–121. 2 was in fact a socially produced object, requiring continual negotiation to be experienced as standardized, as we learned from Roger Chartier and Adrian Johns (Eisenstein 1979, Chartier 1994; Johns 1998). Context makes science, and it takes a community to make a book. Through the case examined here, my goal is to extend this logic from the exceptions—Boyle, Erasmus, and so on—to the standard structure of school learning in the earliest period of print. In the scholarship of the previous paragraph, mainstream compendia still take second place to exceptional works of science, literature, and art.7 While we may find that identifying a textbook is harder than it seems (as Grafton 2008 points out, what is not a textbook?) it is nevertheless clear that, if we care about the social history of knowledge, we should attend more to textbooks, the objects that mapped the cultural assumptions and cognitive practices of the period.8 Furthermore, by considering these texts materially—as objects produced within a particular community and place—similarities emerge between university and workshop. Against the historiographic tendency to seal